‘It took me a very long time to learn how to walk without shackles,’ said one former detainee, Ahmed Errachidi, six years after his release from Guantánamo.
Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images

At least 16 British citizens and residents are among the 774 adults and children known to have been imprisoned in the Guantánamo camps at the US base in the south of Cuba.

All were interviewed by the British authorities on their return. It emerged in 2010 that the government had agreed to pay millions of pounds in compensation to former Guantánamo Bay detainees. Kenneth Clarke, then justice secretary, told parliament in November 2010 that the settlement was “significant” and would have cost taxpayers up to £50m if cases had gone to court.

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A number of former detainees have alleged that UK intelligence services were complicit in torture before they arrived at Guantánamo, with six of the men leading a high court case against government departments. The six are Bisher al-Rawi, Jamil el Banna, Richard Belmar, Omar Deghayes, Binyam Mohamed. They claimed that UK officials were complicit in their transfer to Guantánamo Bay and should have acted to prevent ill-treatment.

Moazzam Begg

A British citizen of Pakistani descent who was detained in Pakistan in 2002 as a suspected member of al-Qaida and sent to Guantánamo for three years. Released in 2005, he continued to advocate for detainees in Guantánamo through the organisation Cage Prisoners. Last October, he walked free from prison in the UK after seven terrorism-related charges connected to the conflict in Syria were dropped.

Binyam Mohamed

A UK resident incarcerated in Guantánamo Bay for more than four years, Mohamed arrived back in the UK in February 2009 following his release. Arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and secretly flown by the CIA to Morocco as part of an extraordinary rendition program, he was subsequently flown to Afghanistan and then to Cuba. He is understood to be living privately in the south of England and has changed his appearance.

Jamal al-Harith

A British convert to Islam who was imprisoned by the Taliban as a suspected UK spy, then taken to Guantánamo Bay by the US, al-Harith was among five UK citizens repatriated from the base in 2004. He is believed to have left the UK 18 months ago to travel to territory in Syria controlled by the so-called Islamic State. His wife recently spoke of a failed attempt to go there with her children and bring him back.

The ‘Tipton three’

Rhuhel Ahmed, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul were detained in Afghanistan on 2001 by a local warlord. The men, from Tipton in the West Midlands, were handed over to US forces before being sent to Guantánamo Bay. They were released from Guantánamo in 2004 and released without charge after being flown back to Britain.

Tarek Dergoul

A UK citizen of Moroccan origin, Dergoul was released back to Britain in 2004 without charge. He has said he was picked up in Afghanistan in 2001 by local warlords who “sold” him to the US. He became the first former captive to sue the UK government when he launched an action in 2007 over tactics used to gather intelligence.

“It’s still hard for me to communicate with people who weren’t there,” he said in 2009, of his life after Guantánamo. “I feel paranoid, like people are out to get me. I feel more comfortable with the guys that were there with me – I feel at ease and I’m OK. If I’m with other people, I start to feel they don’t understand me.”

Feroz Abbasi

Aged 24 when he became the first British national to be detained in Guantánamo in January 2002 after being held in Afghanistan, Abbasi was released in January 2005. The BBC reported that he and another released Briton, Martin Mubenga, had been told by the government that they would not be allowed to have passports.

“Coming back to Britain, you are branded, you live like a guilty man. You assume they are listening to every call, every conversation,” Abbasi told the Observer in 2012.

Bisher al-Rawi

An Iraqi citizen and long-term British resident, al-Rawi was detained in the Gambia in November 2002 and later secretly flown by the CIA to Afghanistan. He joined a legal action in 2007 against the US private airline that transported him to Kabul.

“I hope the lessons learned I will always have and I hope my ‘old me’ a big part of that, I can have back … but it takes a lot longer than I had thought,” he said in an interview with the Witness to Guantánamo project recently. “It has been over four years and I am just now feeling that I can sense that I am getting normal. Before, I could sense I am not normal.”

Omar Deghayes

A Libyan-born British resident who arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and was imprisoned in Guantánamo, Deghayes lost the sight in one eye due to the treatment by guards before being released in 2007.

He told the Guardian in 2010: “To my shock, when I came out from prison the whole country had changed – the surveillance, the Islamophobia, the control orders, secret ­evidence and people being under ­curfews not being able to leave the house.”

He told the Observer in 2013: “It took me a very long time to learn how to walk without shackles. I would take three steps and think I couldn’t go any further. Even now, my life is not the same. The five years I spent in Guantánamo are behind me, but it doesn’t feel like that. It feels as if they’re still in front of me, always present. Life doesn’t taste the same.”

Richard Dean Belmar

A Londoner detained by Pakistani officials in 2002, Belmar was then moved to Guantánamo and released on 25 January 2005. In a subsequent interview with the Observer he spoke of being beaten and humiliated in US custody and retracted statements made under interrogation, such as having listened to Osama bin Laden making a speech.

Martin Mubenga

The holder of dual citizenship with Britain and Zambia, Mubenga was held by the latter’s officials in 2002 and was moved to Guantánamo before being released in January 2005. On his return, he spoke to the Observer about his experiences and plans to sue the UK government. Like Abbasi, he was informed that he would not be issued with a UK passport.

Ahmed Belbacha

An Algerian who moved to the UK and applied for asylum in 2003, Belbacha was granted exceptional leave to remain but had already been in Guantánamo for more than a year by that point, having been arrested in Pakistan during the final days of the Taliban regime. He was transferred to the custody of the government in his homeland Algeria in March 2014.

Abdelnour Sameur

An Algerian army deserter who fled to Britain in 1999 after being ordered to fight against Islamists, Sameur was granted leave to remain in the UK. Sameur told US interrogators that a man he met at Finsbury Park mosque during the summer of 2001 gave him the money to travel to Afghanistan. He was released from Guantánamo in December 2007 along with Omar Deghayes and Jamil el-Banna.

Jamil el-Banna

A Jordanian who was granted refugee status in the UK and settled in London in the late 1990s, the father of five was detained in the Gambia along with his friend Bisher al-Rawi and taken first to Afghanistan and then Guantánamo.